In cellular systems with an added multi-hop relay capability, such as the communication system being developed under IEEE 802.16j, there is a need to select whether to use a direct base station to subscriber station transmission path or a relayed transmission path. Simple techniques used to choose between the two do not take into account the capacity lost by the activation of the base station to relay station link. For example, a particular subscriber station might have an RSSI from a relay station that is stronger than the RSSI from the direct base station link. Based on RSSI alone, the subscriber station might then request that the downlink path include a hop through the relay. However, this is basically a “greedy” approach which does not account for the channel capacity lost in the transmission from the base station to the relay station.
Hence, there is a need to develop an efficient routing algorithm for selecting routes based on meaningful routing metrics and to define the signaling necessary to perform routing operations.